Film Freak Centraltag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-999282957331064452014-11-04T12:13:02-05:00TypePadInterstellar (2014)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01bb07a588e6970d2014-11-04T12:13:02-05:002014-11-04T12:10:10-05:00***/**** starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan directed by Christopher Nolan by Walter Chaw When my wife was pregnant with my daughter, we thought she would miscarry. We'd been through several miscarriages already; the doctors weren't optimistic. I don't know why we agreed to risk it again, the crippling grief and unrecoverable loss. We told ourselves that if we couldn't carry this last child to term, we'd console ourselves with a long vacation, the two of us. The appointment with the doctor the day we were to learn the timing of our misfortune, he found a heartbeat, and we held our breath for the next seven months, through a difficult pregnancy and birth, until she was here. My daughter turned 11 last week and she's perfect. Her brother is 8, and he's perfect, too. I spent the first several months with my daughter as her primary caregiver; I was teaching and writing and my wife was making our living, and I have a relationship with my daughter unusual for it, I think. I look back and it's not her birth that was miraculous--as miracles go, that one happens a few...Bill ChambersThe Dark Knight Rises (2012) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Packtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c0167689a1a21970b2012-12-03T22:44:05-05:002012-12-03T22:12:16-05:00***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A- starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan directed by Christopher Nolan click any image to enlarge by Walter Chaw For all its overreaching (and what's perilously close to a training montage), Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises is fascinating, engaging, and aggressively present. It's a wonderfully-performed melodrama about the sad, intractable state of our sorry state, painted in broad strokes in a muted palette. It's what many would think impossible despite the evidence of its predecessor: a comic book for grown-ups. And it accomplishes what it sets out to do without much in the way of action sequences or hero moments--the irony being, of course, that The Dark Knight Rises is fated to become the best-reviewed and most-lucrative release of 2012 for having the very same qualities for which the deeply-underappreciated Superman Returns was lambasted. I would argue that a wide swath of the people who will adore it will have difficulty articulating exactly why. RUNNING TIME 165 minutes MPAA PG-13 ASPECT RATIO(S) 1.78:1/2.40:1 (1080p/MPEG-4) LANGUAGES English 5.1 DTS-HD MA English DD 2.0 (Stereo) French DD 5.1 Spanish DD 5.1 Portuguese DD 5.1 SUBTITLES...Bill ChambersInception (2010) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01774378722d970d2012-07-19T19:22:57-05:002012-07-19T19:32:01-05:00**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine written and directed by Christopher Nolan by Walter Chaw I dunno, the wordiness of The Dark Knight didn't bother me that much. I suppose it has something to do with it being a comic-book movie and plot-driving pronouncements seeming the order of the day. I find it impossible now to think of The Dark Knight without seeing it as a corollary to No Country For Old Men: the one composed of broad, garish strokes, the other of grace notes you hesitate to call delicate, but that's just what they are. With Inception, Christopher Nolan's correlative piece is Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY, and the comparison in this instance doesn't prove mutually evocative so much as devastating to Nolan's film, exposing his shtick as reams of deadening exposition interrupted by the occasional virtuoso set-piece. It is, in other words, aggressively nothing-special, save for a few astonishing zero-g sequences. As it happens, saying the best part of Inception is its weightlessness is a pretty pithy criticism of the whole damned enterprise. For a film about dreams, it's distinctly light on possibility: Armed with the power to shape...Bill ChambersInsomnia (2002) - [Widescreen Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disctag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017616926b49970c2012-07-19T19:16:30-05:002012-07-19T19:16:49-05:00**/**** DVD - Image A Sound A Extras B BD - Image A+ Sound A Extras B starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Maura Tierney screenplay by Hillary Seitz, based on the screenplay by Nikolaj Frobenius and Erik Skjoldbjærg directed by Christopher Nolan by Walter Chaw Director Christopher Nolan follows up his justifiably hailed indie masterpiece Memento with Insomnia, a mainstream Hollywood remake of Erik Skjoldbjærg's tremendous 1997 Norwegian film of the same name. Like the ill-fated American version of the French/Dutch Spoorloos (a.k.a. The Vanishing), what emerges from this studio remake is a frightened, sometimes patronizing, and ultimately ineffectual thriller that transforms all the controversy and introspection of the original into something rote and predictable. A close comparison between Skjoldbjærg and Nolan's visions for the material brings to light the defective machinery of big-budget motion pictures in Hollywood. The sad irony of such a discussion is that Nolan's Memento was so remarkable because it represented nearly everything that Insomnia is not. Buy at Amazon USA Buy at Amazon Canada RUNNING TIME 118 minutes MPAA R ASPECT RATIO(S) 2.40:1 (16x9-enhanced) LANGUAGES English DD 5.1 French DD 5.1 SUBTITLES English French Spanish CC Yes REGION 1 DISC TYPE DVD-9 STUDIO...Bill ChambersThe Prestige (2006)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017743785b06970d2012-07-19T19:02:31-05:002012-07-19T19:02:31-05:00***/**** starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, based on the novel by Christopher Priest directed by Christopher Nolan by Walter Chaw It's possible to say that Christopher Nolan's perplexing chimera of a film, The Prestige, has something on its mind about not only the nasty, zero-sum game of vengeance but also the belief that if you cut one head off a malevolent beast it will, hydra-like, sprout another. It's a costume drama that feels like the world's darkest, dour-est, most inappropriate thriller serial, placing a series of increasingly complicated and unpleasant revenge-scenarios in chronological order and reminding of, if anything, just how bad Nolan's Memento makes you feel. The Prestige shares a heart of darkness, after all, with that film: a belief that men are essentially callow opportunists and liars who will misuse the people in their lives in order to maintain an illusion of command, however tenuous, over entropy. The manipulation of illusion is arguably the auteur mark of Nolan, who played with the idea of the manipulation of fear as a weapon in Batman Begins, the practical purpose of dream sleep in his remake of Insomnia, and of...Bill ChambersThe Dark Knight (2008) - Blu-ray Disctag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c0176167c9c38970c2012-07-15T20:15:10-05:002012-07-15T20:03:46-05:00****/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Morgan Freeman screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan directed by Christopher Nolan by Walter Chaw It's the best American film of the year so far and likely to remain that way. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is revelatory, visceral, grim stuff--a vision of the failure of our idealism before the inexorable tide of entropy, another masterpiece after last year's No Country for Old Men that as much as says that the only morality in the midst of chaos is chance. No coincidence that both films feature villains who let a coin-flip act as judge and jury. But what's adjudicated? What shape does the court take? The failure of reason is the great bogey of this modern day--and the inability to properly frame questions, much less ken answers, feeds this feeling of hopelessness. That widening gyre, it turns out, is a labyrinth, or an Escher print, illuminating a Sartrean paranoia of no hope for escape, no possibly of exit. Nolan's Gotham City is a beatification of Chicago: the city's glass and metal elevated into holy relic and presented in such grand, panoramic vistas that the little...Bill ChambersBatman Begins (2005)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017743629123970d2012-07-15T19:14:51-05:002012-07-15T19:14:51-05:00****/**** starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer directed by Christopher Nolan by Walter Chaw It's perhaps only right that in a year that has seen Robert Rodriguez present a scary-faithful adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City, Christopher Nolan should re-envision (and revitalize) the Batman film franchise with a picture, Batman Begins, that at last captures the pitch blackness of Miller's seminal graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (itself a re-envisioning and revitalization of Batman for its time). Batman Begins is to Tim Burton's Batman films as Burton's films are to Adam West's camp-classic television series, so drastically have Nolan and co-scriptor David S. Goyer de-fabulized the mythology. Compare, for starters, a sequence in the 1989 film where Batman shines a little penlight in the eyes of an over-curious lady-fair while chauffeuring her in the Batmobile to the modern iteration in which Batman trashes the Gotham police force en route to getting a young lady an antidote to a concentrated militarized hallucinogen that, unchecked, could inspire her to rip her own face off. Buy This at Allposters.com More than appreciably darker, Batman Begins tackles the story's essential Freudian/Jungian mooring, returning...Bill Chambers